Not sure if this is specific enough, but I didn't know a better place for it:

In the words of marine biologists Joe Roman and James McCarthy, many whales feed in the deeper tiers of the sea to then return to the surface and release “flocculent fecal plumes” – cetacean clouds that may create what Roman and McCarthy call a “whale pump“.

The quotation mark breaks wordnik a little. I've hade the same problem, but only in the middle of a "word", so I never got to the randomness. (My random words: direct-driven, honouring, perilune. Will someone tell us how to interpret this type of bibliomancy?)

I stumbled over the poetic term "home scar" and then learned about aggressive gardening mollusks! From Wikipedia:

Some species of limpets return to the same spot on the rock known as a "home scar" just before the tide recedes. In such species, the shape of their shell often grows to precisely match the contours of the rock surrounding the scar. This behaviour presumably allows them to form a better seal to the rock and may help protect them from both predation and desiccation.

It is still unclear how limpets find their way back to the same spot each time, but it is thought that they follow pheromones in the mucus left as they move. Other species, notably Lottia gigantea seem to "garden" a patch of algae around their home scar. They are one of the few invertebrates to exhibit territoriality and will aggressively push other organisms out of this patch by ramming with their shell, thereby allowing their patch of algae to grow for their own grazing.

"Professor Terry Frank Pettijohn II, of Coastal Carolina University, is the lead author of a new study which investigates the ‘Chin Area’ (and other facial features such as ‘Eye Width’) of US country Music singers between 1946 and 2010 – and examines possible correlations with an index of economic and social conditions called the General Hard Times Measure (GHTM)." (found here)

"Female garter snakes will emerge from their winter hibernation — technically called 'brumation,' a hibernation-like state that cold-blooded animals go through during chilly months — a few days after males do. When males catch the pheromone scent of a female, they will swarm over her, forming a 'mating ball.'" (Source)

"The cat gap is a period in the fossil record of approximately 25 to 18.5 million years ago in which there are few fossils of cats or cat-like species found in North America." (Wikipedia)hmm... strange visuals for this one...

Reading about the Emei moustache toad on Wikipedia: "Male Leptobrachium boringii exhibit conspicuous keratinized nuptial spines that grow on their upper lip during the breeding season—these are the 'moustache' and 'spines' referred to in its common names."

"In order to release the pollen, bumblebees and some species of solitary bees are able to grab onto the flower and move their flight muscles rapidly, causing the flower and anthers to vibrate, dislodging pollen. This resonant vibration is called buzz pollination. The honeybee rarely performs buzz pollination. About 8% of the flowers of the world are primarily pollinated using buzz pollination." (Wikipedia)

"Mud-puddling, or simply puddling, is behaviour most conspicuous in butterflies, but occurs in other animals as well, mainly insects; they seek out certain moist substances such as rotting plant matter, mud and carrion and they suck up the fluid. Where the conditions are suitable conspicuous insects such as butterflies commonly form aggregations on wet soil, dung or carrion." (Wikipedia)

"Insects in the order Hymenoptera can be trained to perform a variety of tasks. The sensitivity of the olfactory senses of bees and wasps in particular have been shown to rival the abilities of sniffer dogs, though they can only be trained to detect a single scent each. Sniffer bees and sniffer wasps have been trained to detect substances such as explosive materials or illegal drugs, as well as some human and plant diseases." (Wikipedia)

"Pseudorabies is a viral disease in swine that is endemic in most parts of the world. It is caused by Suid herpesvirus 1 (SuHV-1), which is also called pseudorabies virus (PRV) and is also known as Aujeszky's disease, and in cattle as mad itch." (Wikipedia)

"Pseudorabies is a viral disease in swine that is endemic in most parts of the world. It is caused by Suid herpesvirus 1 (SuHV-1), which is also called pseudorabies virus (PRV) and is also known as Aujeszky's disease, and in cattle as mad itch." (Wikipedia)

"Slime flux is a bacterial disease of certain trees, primarily elm, cottonwood, poplar, boxelder, ash, aspen, fruitless mulberry, and oak. A wound to the bark, caused by pruning, insects, poor branch angles or natural cracks and splits, causes sap to ooze from the wound. Bacteria may infect this sap causing it to darken and stain the bark, eventually taking on a foamy appearance and unpleasant odor. This slimy ooze becomes toxic to the bark and eats into the tree. Additionally, the fermented sap attracts insects like flies, ants, worms, and maggots, which further weaken the tree." (Wikipedia)

I was reading about bee diseases (here) and found this:"Chronic Bee Paralysis Virus (CBPV), is a virus that cause an infectious disease of the adult honey bees. Previously known with different names in different countries such as 'little blacks' (UK), 'hairless black syndrome' (US), 'mal nero' (Italy), 'Schwarzsucht' (Germany) and 'mal noire' (France) (Ribière et al., 2008)."The "prevously" made me a bit sad, since all of these names fit better at my list of sick animals (that often also would be great band names) but I guess I'm just going to list them all anyway...

There, almost hairless bracketed. (I get an image of a poor guinea pig losing its hair but trying to make the most of what's left, maybe trying a combover?) Are there any lists of naked or almost naked animals?

edit: I got so frustrated by trying to edit my original post that I slipped and deleted it. Fortunately, it wasn't very important.

Thanks markusloke! (It's an open list so feel free to add words, but it's nice to get a comment so I'll notice it.)Now I wonder if kentrogon will also fit on my sounding-like-a-superhero list, there's something about words ending i -on...

"The speech banana is a region in which all the phonemes of the world's languages fall on an audiogram. An audiogram is a graphical representation of a person's hearing acuity at a range of frequencies and loudness levels, and it is generally charted with frequency level (in Hertz on the x-axis and decibel level (dB) on the y-axis. When the sounds of speech or phonemes of all known human languages are plotted on an audiogram, they cluster in a banana-shaped region known as the speech banana." (Wikipedia)

"The ferrets are occasionally put inside the contestants' shirts in addition to their trousers. An attempt to introduce a female version of the sport—ferret busting, in which female contestants introduced ferrets down their blouses—proved unsuccessful." (Wikipedia)

"Ruin value (German: Ruinenwert) is the concept that a building be designed such that if it eventually collapsed, it would leave behind aesthetically pleasing ruins that would last far longer without any maintenance at all. The idea was pioneered by German architect Albert Speer while planning for the 1936 Summer Olympics and published as "The Theory of Ruin Value" (Die Ruinenwerttheorie), although he was not its original inventor." (Wikipedia)

"Holothuria mexicana, also known as the Donkey Dung sea cucumber is commonly found in the Caribbean. It is a commercially important aspidochirote (sediment feeding) sea cucumber that can reach a total length of 50 cm (20 in)." (Wikipedia)

"Cryptic choice allows females to preferentially choose sperm. Females are thus able to mate multiple times and allocate sperm to their eggs according to paternal phenotype, or according to other characteristics. In some cases, such as in the yellow dung fly, certain male traits will affect the fitness of eggs laid in particular environmental conditions. Females can choose sperm based on male quality as a function of its interaction with the environment. In other species, such as the fly Dryomyza anilis, females preferentially choose sperm from one storage location over another. Males of this species have developed behaviors, such as abdominal tapping, to increase their number of sperm stored in the favored storage site." (Wikipedia)

"Scathophaga stercoraria, commonly known as the yellow dung fly or the golden dung fly, is one of the most familiar and abundant flies in many parts of the northern hemisphere. As its common name suggests, it is often found on the feces of large mammals, such as horses, cows, sheep, deer, and wild boar, where it goes to breed." (Wikipedia)

"Myrmeconema neotropicum is a new genus and species of parasitic tetradonematidnematode that apparently induces fruit mimicry in the tropical ant Cephalotes atratus. Infected ants develop bright red gasters, tend to be more sluggish, and walk with their gasters in a conspicuous elevated position. These changes likely cause frugivorous birds to confuse the infected ants for berries and eat them. Parasite eggs passed in the bird's feces are subsequently collected by foraging Cephalotes atratus and are fed to their larvae, thus completing the life cycle of Myrmeconema neotropicum." (Wikipedia)

"In mathematics, a pair of pants is a simple two-dimensional surface resembling a pair of pants: topologically, it is a sphere with three holes in it. Pairs of pants admit hyperbolic metrics, and their isometry class is determined by the lengths of the boundary curves (the cuff lengths), or dually the distances between the boundaries (the seam lengths)." (Wikipedia)

Ooh, nice meta list, I need to check the others out! And I bet I could find quite a few words that should be used in speculative or science fiction.

(I was wondering if it was metalist, meta list or meta-list, but metalist seems to be someone who works with metals, and the internet is full of lists and all things meta, and then I gave up searching...)

"Flowerhorn cichlids are ornamental aquarium fish noted for their vivid colors and the distinctively shaped heads for which they are named. Their head protuberance, or kok, is formally termed a 'nuchal hump.'" (Wikipedia)

"Pseudo-melanism, also called abundism, is another variant of pigmentation, characterized by dark spots or enlarged stripes, which cover a large part of the body of the animal making it appear melanistic. A deficiency in or total absence of melanin pigments is called amelanism." (Wikipedia)

"At any given moment, there could be heard a 'latrinophone' (which is a toilet seat strung with catgut), a 'crashophone' (bags of metal balls dropped into a metal washtub, in order to make the sound of breaking glass)" (From this article about Spike Jones)

"Two main types of reproduction occur in frogs, prolonged breeding and explosive breeding. In the former, adopted by the majority of species, adult frogs at certain times of year assemble at a pond, lake or stream to breed. Many frogs return to the bodies of water in which they developed as larvae. This often results in annual migrations involving thousands of individuals. In explosive breeders, mature adult frogs arrive at breeding sites in response to certain trigger factors such as rainfall occurring in an arid area. In these frogs, mating and spawning take place promptly and the speed of larval growth is rapid in order to make use of the ephemeral pools before they dry up." (Wikipedia)

The tiny central Amazonian frog -- the Rhinella proboscidea -- is a species that engages in 'explosive breeding', that is, a frantic competition for mates that takes place when large groups of animals gather for a few days. In this case, that means several hundred males congregate in small streamside ponds or headwaters for two or three days. When this happens, there is a brutal struggle to procreate, where many males become exhausted from fighting other males for receptive females. Meanwhile the females can sometimes get unintentionally crushed to death or drowned." (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/20/frog-necrophilia)

"In his later years, Grainger developed an aversion to English words with Latin roots—so the word 'museum' was, in this system, to be replaced with the term 'Hoard House'. He hoped this was what all museums would henceforth be called. I agree. The Guggenheim Hoard House, the Hoard House of Modern Art—let’s be honest about what these places are."

From David Byrne's Journal about Percy Grainger, where there's also a list of "Blue-Eyed English", wich is "the English language purged of all Latinisms", and might deserve a list of its own.

"Arowanas are freshwater bony fish of the family Osteoglossidae, also known as bonytongues. In this family of fish, the head is bony and the elongate body is covered by large, heavy scales, with a mosaic pattern of canals. The dorsal and the anal fins have soft rays and are long based, while the pectoral and ventral fins are small. The name 'bonytongues' is derived from a toothed bone on the floor of the mouth, the 'tongue', equipped with teeth that bite against teeth on the roof of the mouth. The arowana is a facultative air breather and can obtain oxygen from air by sucking it into the swim bladder, which is lined with capillaries like lung tissue." (Wikipedia)

"In computability theory, a busy beaver is a Turing machine that attains the maximum number of steps performed or number of nonblank symbols finally on the tape among all Turing machines in a certain class. The Turing machines in this class must meet certain design specifications and are required to eventually halt after being started with a blank tape.

A busy beaver function quantifies these upper limits on a given measure, and is a noncomputable function. In fact, a busy beaver function can be shown to grow faster asymptotically than does any computable function. The concept was first introduced by Tibor Radó as the 'busy beaver game' in his 1962 paper, 'On Non-Computable Functions'."

"A beating heart cadaver is a human body that though dead in all medical and legal definitions is attached to a medical ventilator and retains cardio-pulmonary functions. This will keep the organs of the dead body, including the heart, functioning and alive for a few days. As a result, the period of time in which the organs may be used for transplantation is extended." (Wikipedia)

Phyllobates lugubris. I can't really tell why this is more lovely than other poison dart frogs, but at least the lovely hatchetfish has a companion now. (Not ready to create a list for them just yet...)

As you wish, bilby (although now there's a complete Fonk absence, but I bet it's just a trick). I must say that the trending words list is the thing I understand the least around here. Does anyone know anything about what sort of algorithm it might be using?

I keep seeing this word as if it was in Swedish. Not that it makes sense, but muskelunge (Wikipedia says that's an alternate way of spelling it, but it doesn't matter, I see it in muskellunge as well) would mean muscle-kid, or perhaps muscle-offspring. So now my brain is trying to make images of what that would look like...

"The Oh-My-God particle was an ultra-high-energy cosmic ray (most likely a proton) detected on the evening of 15 October 1991 over Dugway Proving Ground, Utah. Its observation was a shock to astrophysicists, who estimated its energy to be approximately 3×10^20 eV (50 J)—in other words, a subatomic particle with kinetic energy equal to that of a 5-ounce (142 g) baseball traveling at about 100 kilometers per hour (60 mph)." (Wikipedia)

"The Swoon Hypothesis refers to a number of theories that aim to explain the resurrection of Jesus, proposing that Jesus did not die on the cross, but merely fell unconscious ('swooned'), and was later revived in the tomb in the same mortal body." (Wikipedia)

Speaking of Australia... This article is about "earrings made out of koala feces sold by the True Blue Roo Poo Company, an Australian business that specializes in making products out of animal poop." But I can't find their web page, so maybe they are out of business? (But I don't see how that could be possible.)

An unusually efficient spammer too, I had to cut my way through a wall of spam to ger here... And who knows what's buried so deep in spam that it's lost forever? (As far as I see, there is no way of seeing older stuff than what's visible on the first page, is that right?)

"The Scunthorpe problem occurs when a spam filter or search engine blocks e-mails or search results because their text contains a string of letters that are shared with an obscene word. While computers can easily identify strings of text within a document, broad blocking rules may result in false positives, causing innocent phrases to be blocked.

The problem was named after an incident in 1996 in which AOL's dirty-word filter prevented residents of the town of Scunthorpe, North Lincolnshire, England from creating accounts with AOL, because the town's name contains the substring cunt." (Wikipedia)

"A quantum dot is a portion of matter (e.g., semiconductor) whose excitons are confined in all three spatial dimensions. Consequently, such materials have electronic properties intermediate between those of bulk semiconductors and those of discrete molecules." (Wikipedia)

Yes, where will it all end? But we must be brave, and continue to move on, further and further, towards the limit. (The human limit, that is, I guess it should be fairly simple to make some sort of computer script to do this... hmm... It could easily become an entire book... hmm...)

Sure, go ahead and add them if you like. I think the best animals are the ones where I can imagine som sort of cyborg monster (like, the knife-footed frog is a frog with actual knives for feet) but other violent animals are also welcome.

At the risk of being spammy... I've made an advent calendar this year, with little stop motion animations for every day until Christmas. It's almost completely wordless, but if you like toys and decorations being sacreligious and/or silly you can see it here.

I grew up with multiple advent calendars myself. In Sweden there is a calendar that is related to a daily television show that most swedish children probably watch every day...

"One technical problem was that buried objects—especially during winter—can get very cold, and it was possible the mine would not have worked after some days underground, due to the electronics being too cold to operate properly. Various methods to get around this were studied, such as wrapping the bombs in insulating blankets. One particularly remarkable proposal suggested that live chickens should be included in the mechanism. The chickens would be sealed inside the casing, with a supply of food and water; they would remain alive for a week or so. The body heat given off by the chickens would, it seems, have been sufficient to keep all the relevant components at a working temperature. This proposal was sufficiently outlandish that it was taken as an April Fool's Day joke when the Blue Peacock file was declassified on April 1, 2004. Tom O'Leary, head of education and interpretation at the National Archives, replied to the media that, 'It does seem like an April Fool but it most certainly is not. The Civil Service does not do jokes.'" (Wikipedia)

"The Raspberry Bud Dagger Moth, Raspberry Bud Moth or Peach Sword Stripe Night Moth (Acronicta increta) is a moth of the family Noctuidae. It is distributed throughout the south of Canada and the United States down to Florida and Texas. The status of this species is disputed. Some authors regard Acronicta increta a synonym of Acronicta inclara." (Wikipedia)

"Caudal luring is the use of tail movements employed by a predator to attract prey animals. It is a form of mimicry classified formally as aggressive mimicry, but perhaps better described by the term feeding mimicry. The behavior is employed by a number of snake species and allegedly by two lizards, though other interpretations (e.g., distraction) seem more plausible for the lizards. Caudal luring also occurs in a shark, the tasselled wobbegong, Eucrossorinus dasypogon." (Wikipedia)

"The Shocking Pink Dragon Millipede (Desmoxytes purpurosea) is a spiny and toxicmillipede named for its vivid pink color. First discovered in 2007 in the Hup Pa Tard limestone cavern in Thailand, within the Greater Mekong, the adult millipede is approximately 3 cm long and lives in the open on leaf litter. The millipedes have glands that produce hydrogen cyanide to protect them from predators, a fact advertised by their aposematic color. Because they produce cyanide, they smell like almonds." (Wikipedia)

"Forcipules are a unique feature found only in centipedes and in no other arthropods. The forcipules are modifications of the first pair of legs, forming a pincer-like appendage always found just behind the head. Forcipules are not true mouthparts, although they are used in the capture of prey items, injecting venom and holding onto captured prey. Venom glands run through a tube almost to the tip of each forcipule." (Wikipedia)

I like the sound of pornologic! (Even though it's unnecessary when you have -graphic. Maybe you can use some sort of pseudoetymology to claim that pornography is just one (extreme) form of calligraphy...)

About vulgar, If they mean "adj. Of or associated with the great masses of people; common." there might problems... (that get worse as Wordnik gets more users...)